It worked great in Sun's phone emulator, it worked great on my Motorola RAZR that's running Sun's JVM. And then someone else tried it out. And it failed. It failed in a weird way... the text labels on UI elements were invisible. The program itself ran, but there's no text.

This is on a Motorola Q with Windows Mobile 5.0 and the IBM WebSphere Everywhere Micro Environment. That environment is supposedly compatible with the CLDC 1.0/MIDP 2.0 that I built the JAR for. That's the same environment running on my RAZR.

So much for write once, run everywhere. 12 years, let me just repeat that: 12 years, after the introduction of this technology I'm reduced to downloading IBM's entire environment just to be able to debug an application because it doesn't work.

And people wonder why I shy away from Java. Every time I touch it, it bites me.

1 Comments:

I've had a running joke about Java on Windows being write once, update multiply. But what you say is sooooo true; even back in 1997 we ran into problems with Java on the Mac broken in different ways than Java on windows or Java on Sun.

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